For those of you who are unaware, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a three week period where the world’s performing arts sector descends on one (now highly suspecting) Scottish city.
It is the world’s biggest arts festival and its biggest arts market. It’s where the next big comedian will be found, the next big theatre phenomenon, and on the other end of the spectrum, the worst and most messed up things that will hopefully never break containment.
It is several tens of thousands of artists and audiences squeezed into a landmass the size of Dunedin, where people wander around with plastic cups, paper flyers and half-charged phones with the ticketing app open. To misquote my close family member Meredith Brooks, “It’s your hell, it’s your dream, it’s everything in between and you wouldn’t want it any other way.”
My first day of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival felt like a capsule of both wolves within the festival.
The first? The struggle of the everyday struggling artist, the one we might hear about, the one we regrettably saw in Baby Reindeer. On the train to Edinburgh, I sat opposite a couple who were animatedly talking about something while tapping a loose pile of A4 paper. I knew immediately: These were performers going to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
If I didn’t know then, my airpods took the moment to spontaneously die and I managed to hear this tremendous confirmation: “If you’re gonna do this style of show, you need to commit to doing this style of show.” Two Fringe performers if I’ve ever heard them.
I immediately put my pods back in their case, pleading them to charge before they started to practise their lines. Sadly, they did not charge before the male of the pair indignantly said, “She needs to understand that she’s breaking my rules.”
The other? Seeing a gem of a genuinely great show. One that has been honed and is so ready for an audience. That show – the first of many in this vein – ended up being Nic Sampson: Yellow Power Ranger.
I’ve known Nic for a while, but hadn’t seen his comedy in a few years due to him moving to the UK, and I was delighted to see that his perfect blend of darkness and silliness has only gotten more potent and funnier. This experience also replicated a classic New Zealand experience, as I ran into seven other people in the audience who were also from New Zealand. You can fly across the other side of the world, and still run into someone you saw back home the week before.
There really are two sides to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, ones that can even be cleanly delineated between the words “fringe” and festival”.
There’s the Fringe; shows that are having their first outing, where the artists involved are flyering desperately to get people in the door to bolster their ticket sales from zero to anywhere between three to 30.
I managed to see only one of these: a lovely show in a wet-smelling concrete bunker about two flatmates living out the last six hours of the apocalypse together. Thirteen other people were in attendance, and the applause was polite. If I closed my eyes, I could’ve been at a Basement Studio show 10 years ago.
The rest of my festival was, well, a festival vibe. There are all the people rushing around telling everybody what show to see, “Oh my god, you have to see L’Addition (yes, the name of an actual show) but it’s already sold out!”.
There are artists out until the wee hours of the morning, checking their dead phones to calculate how much time they have until they have to be up to pack-in. Every day, more four and five star reviews are pasted up over posters, letting everybody know these are the shows to see.
Even if you wanted to escape the festival, you can’t. On one corner, you can see the poster for the show, begging you to see it. On the next? The artist on the poster, also begging you to see it. Then the next? Someone who just saw the show, begging you not to see it. It’s a vibe, like nowhere else.
Frankly, it can be overwhelming. But if you love art, in all its variants, and all its forms, there is nowhere quite like Edinburgh. I got to see FAME HUNGRY, a show where English performance artist Louise Orwin vivisected her relationship with both TikTok and performance art. I got to see Cyrano, a queer Australian retelling of the French classic, turning it on its tragic head.
I got to be a one-off cast member in the soon-to-be-classic Gwyneth Goes Skiing, a musical about the infamous legal trial that saw Paltrow victorious against a basically anonymous optometrist (I played Brad Falchuk, and I think I nailed it).
When I emerged from the festival, 32 shows and [redacted] average pours deep, I had only one question on my lips, “How do I go next year?”
Some quickfire before I go:
A list of things I did see in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival:
• Meal deals at the supermarkets; a revolutionary concept that needs to come here
• More New Zealanders than I’ve ever seen in New Zealand, we truly punch above our weight there
• A Drag Race UK contestant flyering in sneakers (respect)
• A dance show so bad it could’ve been labelled as good theatre
• A theatre show so bad it could’ve been labelled anti-comedy
• A comedy show so misogynist it could’ve been well… a comedy show
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge, in the flesh, or maybe as a ghost
• A show I hated so profoundly that I had to walk a different way back to the accom from everybody else
• A show I loved so profoundly I wanted to see it every night before I left
• A show where a man shoved a steel rod in his dick, then set it on fire (these are all different shows)
A list of things I did not see in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival:
• A paper ticket (RIP, paper)
• A fresh vegetable
• A well-rested person in the mirror
